Emma Goldman Archives - The Libertarian Labyrinth

Letters to “l’en dehors” from Max Nettlau and Emma Goldman (1922)

September 8, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

Vienne, 22 juillet 1922. Mon cher camarade, … Je suis très content d’apprendre que vos malheurs ont pris fin — jusqu’au moment où on voudra frapper à nouveau l’esprit « en dehors » que vous êtes. En ce qui me concerne je végète ici, mes ailes d’oiseau voyageur sont coupées par le cours de l’argent étranger. C’est ici où je suis encore le mieux, me confondant avec la misère générale, tandis qu’ailleurs je ferais tache. Quant à votre demande de m’inscrire sur la liste de vos collaborateurs, faites comme vous voulez : vos journaux seront toujours des expressions de pensée […]

Emma Goldman (1869-1940)

July 2, 2019 Shawn P. Wilbur

Related links: Anarchy and the Sex Question [collection] Poems about Emma Goldman Sketches of Emma: By Emma Goldman: Articles: Emma Goldman & John Most, “Anarchy Defended by Anarchists,” Metropolitan Magazine 4 no 3 (October, 1896). Emma Goldman, “The Effect of War on the Workers,” Freedom (London) 14 no. 146 (March-April, 1900): 11. EG and Max Baginski, “Mother Earth,” Mother Earth 1 no. 1 (March, 1906): 1-4. “The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation,” Mother Earth 1 no. 1 (March 1906): 9-18. “The Child and Its Enemies,” Mother Earth 1 no. 2 (April 1906): 7-14. EG and Max Baginski, “A Sentimental Journey – […]

Suggestions for Discussion (1928)

May 31, 2018 Shawn P. Wilbur

In 1928, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman proposed a small gathering of sympathetic anarchists—including Goldman, Berkman, Max Nettlau, Rudolf Rocker, Luigi Fabbri, Marie Goldsmith, Sébastien Faure and Alexander Shapiro—to discuss the future of the anarchist movement. The meeting was to be a secret, even from most anarchist comrades. They circulated a “syllabus” of “Suggestions for Discussion,” asking for responses from those who could not attend and possible revisions for use in the discussion. I’m collecting material related to the proposed gathering here, for possible inclusion in a later volume of Anarchist Beginnings, focused on internal anarchist critique. SUGGESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION […]

Available Now! Anarchy and the Sex Question

October 19, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

Anarchy and the Sex Question: Essays on Women and Emancipation, 1896-1917 By Emma Goldman Edited by Shawn P. Wilbur Available from PM Press Emma Goldman (1869 – 1940) remains one of the best known figures of the political tradition known as anarchism, and with good reason, as few writers have so convincingly explained the evils of authority in government. But Goldman’s anarchism extended beyond the political realm, and arguably found its most essential expressions in her writings on matters more directly connected to everyday life. For Goldman, anarchism was not just an ideology, but a living force in the affairs […]

Emma Goldman, “Walt Whitman” (incomplete manuscript)

August 18, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

[two_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] WALT WHITMAN Last summer I listened to the reading of a very fine paper on Walt Whitman, at the Public Library of the city. I was struck by what seem[ed] to me a futile attempt on the part of some of the men who participated in the discussion to contrast Walt Whitman with some European poets. Not that Whitman was the greatest of all times or all nations. I even think some of his biographers have rendered the poet of Leaves of Grass scant services when they proclaimed him greater than Homer and Socrates. The […]

Voltairine de Cleyre & Emma Goldman, “Tour Impressions” and “A Rejoinder” (1910-11)

July 25, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

TOUR IMPRESSIONS LEAVING Philadelphia on Friday, the 7th of October, I began my meeting with comrades and their work on that evening in New York, and from that day till the present writing (I date at Buffalo, the 18th of October) I have addressed nine meetings,—two in New York, one in Albany, one in Schenectady, one in Rochester, and four in Buffalo. In all these places I have to thank all comrades for kindly courtesy and fraternal service. But these, while most grateful to me personally, are of course not of public interest. What the readers of Mother Earth will […]

Horace Traubel, “Free Speech in Philadelphia or Anywhere” (1909)

July 7, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

Free Speech in Philadelphia or Anywhere.* I. I am glad that in speaking of Emma Goldman today you took high ground for free speech and shooed off the dogs of war. There’s no sense in trying to kill ideas with brickbats and guns. The policeman’s club is never an argument. It always vulgarly and brutally remains a policeman’s club. To suppress Emma Goldman is not an evidence of power but a confession of weakness. Imagine a whole nation put on edge by a little woman a few feet high who says a few things with which majorities do not agree! […]

Emma Goldman, “Walt Whitman”

July 6, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

[two_third padding=”0 10px 0 0px”] The poet of Leaves of Grass is a true son of American soil and yet very un-American. So long as he sings the song of the wonders of nature, the beauties of the unlimited resources, old Walt feels part and parcel of the strength of Mother Earth, but our great poet becomes un-American when he arraigns the Puritanic interference which has paralyzed life to such an extent as to make it barren. In fact, Walt Whitman may be called the iconoclast of Puritanism. No other writer or poet in America has so thoroughly exposed the […]

Emma Goldman, “Russell Sage” (1906)

June 28, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

RUSSELL SAGE. Emma Goldman. WHAT an indictment against Society! Impure and poisonous, indeed, must have been the soil that nurtured such a plant. The champions of the capitalistic system assert that the majority will ever have to live in poverty and misery, and that millions of backs are to remain forever bent, to sustain the magnificent structure called civilization. Were we all to toil to produce the mere necessities of life—they say—who would foster art, poetry, and literature? Surely, there must be a select few. By their culture and aestheticism, by their refinement and beauty, they illuminate and elevate those […]

Emma Goldman, “The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation” (1906)

June 27, 2017 Shawn P. Wilbur

The Tragedy of Woman’s Emancipation By Emma Goldman I BEGIN my article with an admission: Regardless of all political and economic theories, treating of the fundamental differences between the various groups within the human race, regardless of class and race distinctions, regardless of all artificial boundary lines between woman’s rights and man’s rights, I hold that there is a point where these differentiations may meet and grow into one perfect whole. With this I do not mean to propose a peace treaty. The general social antagonism which has taken hold of our entire public life to-day, brought about through the […]